Ideas and Practices in the History of Medicine, 1650–1820

Most of these essays touch upon, and some of them are exclusively concerned with, small scale social processes: e.g. the routines of the all-female early-modern childbirth ritual, the different ways that male practitioners were summoned to such occasions, the functioning of voluntary hospitals, the protocols underlying patient records. Whenever there comes into being something new - whether an institution, a social practice or a concept - the question arises as to its relationship with what went before. This concept resonates throughout these essays, but is most to the fore in the chapters on early Hanoverian London and on Porter versus Foucault.